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This Is Us
My Boyfriend’s Family Was Not a Replacement for My Own
I still want to fill that void, but I’ve accepted it may not happen
A few weeks ago, my boyfriend Kevin had a fight with his sister. Not something you’d think would send me spiraling into an emotional breakdown. Well, allow me to introduce myself then: I’m Dani, and sometimes I lose my mind over things as banal as sibling spats. I spent a week doing the following:
- Alternating between crying and tending to my spasming neck.
- Not eating.
- Meddling and making things worse.
Because, if I’ve learned anything over the course of my lifetime, it’s this: I can see the future.
To give some context as to why a fight between a brother and a sister would rile me up so much, I need to say a few words — three in particular: cornucopia of dysfunction. That’s what someone once called my family. For reasons about which I’m writing an entire memoir (*shameless self-promotion), my family’s been fractured for years — here are the cliff’s notes: mental illness, addiction, and financial ruin. We are not a family that gets all warm and fuzzy at holidays, and over the last 10 years, that fact has filled me with a sadness I thought I wouldn’t survive. I did.
